GW: How do you keep track of all your song ideas? NY: I'm pretty good at remembering. I also have an archivist, Joel Bernstein, who keeps track of this stuff for this big retrospective set I'm working on. Joel has been working with me for three years, and we've got the past pretty well sowed out. "Unknown Legend" actually was a song Joel brought me; he kept bringing me the lyrics and saying, "What is this thing?" I said, It's a song I started back in '82. I don't think I ever finished it." He kept bringing it back to me, and one day I picked up my guitar and finished it right there. But that doesn't happen very often with me. The real good ones come right away, just in one sitting. GW: So many writers just throw away songs...and they're gone forever. NY: It's a unique thing when you start a song at one point and finish it years later. Neil Young Guitar World/Gary Graff June 1993

Back in 1974, there was a bar up on Skyline Boulevard, California Highway 35, located on the ridge above the ranch. It was called Alex’s, and Pegi was working there. Alex’s was the place where “I used to order just to watch her walk across the floor.” It’s funny to see how a song can start out in fact and go completely to fantasy but then still be there, in the moment. “Unknown Legend,” as sometimes happens, starts out with a factual reference and just goes off into a world that opens up for me once the music starts. This song was a memory that returned to me when I found its lyrics written on an old newspaper fifteen years after I had written it. Soon the melody and chords came rushing back. When I picked up Hank, my old Martin D-28 that once belonged to Hank Williams, the song flowed as if it had always been there. When I finished it and recorded it for Harvest Moon around 1990, Ben Keith’s playing was among the most beautiful I had ever heard. Neil Young Special Deluxe October 2014